Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood

M. Billye Sankofa Waters is Associate Teaching Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University. Her research interests include sociology of education, Black feminism, critical race theory, and qualitative inquiry.Venus E. Evans-Winters is Associate Professor of Education at Illinois State University in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations. Her research interests are school resilience, urban education policy and reform, and the schooling of Black girls and women across the Diaspora. Bettina L. Love is Associate Professor of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the ways in which urban youth negotiate Hip Hop music and culture to form social, cultural, and political identities to create new and sustaining ways of thinking about urban education and intersectional social justice.

• M. Billye Sankofa Waters: Liner Notes: Introducing a 20-Year Reflection – Grisel Y. Acosta: Hard Rock (The Truth about Jezebel) – Adrienne R. Washington/Diana A. Burnett: Examining Linguistic Continuity and the Richness and Multidimensionality of Black Atlantic Communicative Practices through the Lyricism of Lauryn Hill – Qiana M. Cutts: Blackgirl Praxis through Rhetorical Architecture: An Ethnopoetic Reading of Miseducation – Alexis McGee: Black Feminist Rhetorical Praxis: The Agency of Holistic Black Women in Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Contemporary Works – Aja D. Reynolds: Give Me My Crooked Crown Momma – Grisel Y. Acosta: Nothing but Us – Dawn N. Hicks Tafari/Nwachi G.E. Tafari: Care for Me: One Black Girl’s Road to Acknowledging the Ex-Factor – Grisel Y. Acosta: Revolution Mami – Raven Jones Stanbrough/Ashley Newby: The Rhetoric of the Womb: (Academic) Mothering in Trying Times on the Road to Zion – Geneva L. Sarcedo/Cheryl E. Matias: Forgive Them Father for They Know Not What They Do… But What If They Do Know?!: The Impact of Unforgivable Whiteness on Black and Brown Women – Sherell A. McArthur: My Sister, Myself: Why the Miseducation of Black Girls Requires Spaces and Places for Their Healing – Nazera Sadiq Wright: Saving Me Softly: A Black Girl in Japan – Sarah Abdelaziz: Father, You Saved Me – Robin M. Boylorn: "Somebody/anybody, sing a black girl’s song": The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as Blackgirl Autoethnography – Torie Weiston-Serdan: Tell Me Who I Can Be: Mentoring Queer Black Girls in Hostile Educational Spaces – Nadrea R. Njoku/Shawna M. Patterson-Stephens/Lori D. Patton/Maurisa Li-A-Ping/Ellise Smith: Fantasy, Reality, and What Is Needed: Debunking Fantasy and Centering Truth in Black Women College Students’ Experiences – Jessica Edwards: Lauryn Hill and the Power of Digital Storytelling in Writing Classrooms – David Green: Lauryn Hill and Pedagogies of Critical Hip-Hop – Tara Betts: The Miseducation Was Ms. Lauryn Hill’s Education: The Inspiration and Activism of an Emcee – Shanyce L. Campbell: Forgive Them: The Silencing of Black Women in Graduate School – ReAnna S. Roby/Elizabeth J. Cook: A Re-Storying of the Academy by the Lost Ones – Tanja Burkhard/Valerie Kinloch: Black Feminist Auto-Ethnography on Black Womanhood across Space – Stephanie Troutman/Eric A. House: Wrecking Patriarchy and Capitalism in Lauryn Hill’s Hip Hop – Conā S.M. Marshall: The Hill from Whence My Help Comes: Black Women Rapping and Preaching Activism and Liberation – Marta Mack-Washington/Magaela C. Bethune/Ahmad R. Washington: Negotiating Complicated Relationships with Misogynoir in Hip Hop – Lauren Leigh Kelly: Lessons from a Black Feminist Critical Scholar – Stephanie Latty/Sefanit Habtom/Eve Tuck: Practice Extending across the Atlas: Black Girls’ Geographies in Settler Societies – Contributors.

“Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader is poised to reverberate the vibrations Lauryn Hill shot from her groundbreaking and still arguably unmatched album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Sankofa Waters, Evans-Winters, and Love have assembled a transdisciplinary group of boundary breaking scholar-artist-activist-educators. Drawing upon fields of study, including rhetoric, composition, critical pedagogy, Hiphop feminism, ethnomusicology, linguistics, Hiphop/education, literacy, literature and more, this text exemplifies culturally sustaining pedagogy, as it focuses upon the liberatory work achieved through Lauryn Hill’s music: Sista scholars in the academy deliver the theory and praxis of rhetoric from the womb; Hiphop scholars develop reciprocity of critical consciousness in community with their students; and Blackgirl scholars of education juxtapose the stories of Ntozake Shange with the songs of Lauryn Hill illuminating their autoethnographical commonalities, how they strike chords in the lives of Blackgirls through soulful Black language and culture, strumming our pain and healing our wounds sonically, lyrically, and spiritually with the power of vulnerability. In her introduction, Sankofa Waters proclaims The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as ‘the Combahee soundtrack for the Blackgirl shaped by Hip Hop.…’ Whereas the authors represented in this text are carving out free spaces for all Black lives, in the same spirit as Sankofa Waters, I declare Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood a project of liberation that creates a type of space where all Black voices are hoisted by the voice of Lauryn Hill from Newark to Israel and beyond.”—Elaine Richardson, Artist, Advocate, Academic, Survivor, The Ohio State University